By Harvey Neville
"There's music in the sighing of a reed;
There's music in the gushing of a rill;There's music in all things,
if men had ears:Their earth is but an echo of the spheres."
Lord Byron
Don Juan
Canto XVNEW YORK -- Dee McCandless and Gene Menger have very good ears indeed. McCandless' choreography and Menger's music taps and shapes those sounds and visions which most of us miss in life. Through their work we see and hear otherwise invisible patterns and silent harmonies. Their collective art stresses mental boundaries. Waterworks I & II, for example, when performed at Barton Springs in 1979 and this summer, called forth a place never seen before by many people.
McCandless and her Austin-based company, Invisible Inc., expanded some New Yorkers' mental boundaries with performances here of her feature-length work, Ziggurat. Invisible Inc.'s Aug. 27-29 performances were sponsored by the Dance Theatre Workshop as its final presentation in this season's "Out-of-Towners Series." DTW was formed 17 years ago as a choreographers' cooperative, and today helps to provide performance opportunities and support for choreographers.
In ancient Babylonia, the ziggurat was a temple having the form of a terraced pyramid of successively receding stories. McCandless' Ziggurat, with music and sets by Menger, is a fugue where each melodic line is a composite of movement and sound, one line built upon another.
Deconstruction is a part of the work also. At the beginning of the piece, the set, a continuous partition of folding sections, forms two concentric ziggurats, both laid down on their sides with the top layers toward the audience. Two men dressed in traditional black oriental garb silently fold up the structure while a simple, synthesized rhythmic pattern is played. The music controls the action and when there is a silent pause, they stop. When the outer ziggurat is folded back, leaving only the inner one, four female dancers' heads pop up from behind the center of the partition. They stand one behind the other facing the audience, shaking their heads to the music. Percussive variations are subtly and progressively added with Menger's sound generators.
As the two men fold back the inner partition, the dancers begin moving in repeated patterns, singly, in groups of two or as a unit. They march, walk, pivot and spin. The movement reshapes and fills the space left vacant by the removal of the partition. Led by McCandless, the dancers define the area's boundaries with a series of expanding left-to-right, diagonal and upstage-downstage crosses. These evolving right triangles form the primary building unit of each terrace in McCandless' invisible ziggurat.
Having fulfilled their function of removing the tangible -- the confining ziggurat-like set -- the two men join Menger, sitting far upstage surrounded by an array of sophisticated electronic keyboards. Taking up their electric guitars they sit on either side of him. McCandless made the comment after one performance that she finds ziggurats everywhere. Even the etched metallic circuitry on the smallest electronic chip in a synthesizer forms a ziggurat pattern.
Those components are unseen. But the dance and the music inexorably grow out of an organic unity which encompasses even the smallest detail of the dancers' and the musicians' environment. Thus the unseen is made manifest.
The music which began with the simplest of rhythmic structures became so layered with variations and harmonic modulations that eventually what had sounded like the accompaniment to a Hindu ritual evolved into funk music. The dance followed suit with movement which, but for its elegance, would not be out of place at Club Foot. How fortunate it is for dancers to have someone creating music as they move -- not random or extemporaneous, but carefully controlled and infinitely adaptable.
With McCandless' own performance the music flowed through her forms. The same could not be said of the other three dancers, Roberta De Angelis, Diane Gregg and J. A. Lazarus. They were visibly trying to follow the music rather than just being an extension of it.
As artists, McCandless and Menger create and perform in ways which allow their audience to see past the flesh and into the spirit. If there is a music of the spheres which flows through all things McCandless and Menger will hear and report it.